Zombie killers, warriors, carjackers and puzzle solvers gathered last week  for the ultimate nerd summit: the 2nd Annual New York Videogame Critics Circle Awards.

The event, held at the Pfizer Auditorium at the NYU Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, was well attended by bald men in thick-framed glasses and suit jackets, plus serious male and female gamers of all ages, some of whom tapped away at handheld games while they waited for the ceremony to begin.

The night kicked off with a panel discussion moderated by Harold Goldberg, who founded the NYVGCC three and a half years ago after seeing a need for community among videogame critics.

“I think, generally, critics as a whole are kind of a solitary bunch,” Mr. Goldberg, who is a former music critic, told the Transom. “We get together and talk about games [and] about nerd stuff.”

During the discussion, the members of the prestigious Circle, game critics from publications including CNET, Time, AOL Games and No Sleep Geeks spoke with conviction about the best and worst games released in 2012.

The Circle then honored the creators of the last year’s top games with 10 awards, including the A Train Award for Best Mobile/iOS Game, the Tin Pan Alley Award for Best Music in a Game and the coveted Big Apple Award for Best Game. The winners, some of whom traveled from Canada and Europe to attend the ceremony, took home gold joystick trophies.

Daniel Radosh, a staff writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, played host for the evening. He spoke about the importance of games being recognized as art and the industry getting the credit it deserves.

“Trust me, Assassin’s Creed III is every bit as historically accurate as the movie about Lincoln…The one where he hunts vampires,” Mr.  Radosh told the crowd.

No award show is complete without a moment to remember departed members of an artistic community. The NYVGCC honored the deceased with a farcical memorial montage—a series of video game stills depicting chainsaw beheadings, bloody massacres and bodies exploding in balls of fires as “The Way We Were” played softly in the background.

The audience was also treated to performances by “nerd core” rappers Schaffer the Darklord and MC Frontalot.

In the end, the creators of The Walking Dead, a narrative zombie apocalypse thriller based on a comic book series of the same name, took home four awards, including the Big Apple Award.

“I think what happened with The Walking Dead was the narrative was so emotionally engaging that we all felt moved when we played it,” Mr. Goldberg told the Transom. “It’s not the highest quality graphics, but the writing is very good and the acting is very good, and you are kind of emotionally in it.”

Sam Kaplan, a techie from New York said critics’ opinions are important in his gaming decisions.

"It’s like any other critic system,” Mr. Kaplan said. “I follow two different critics who have two different opinions about games. People tend to find a personality they like and that kind of reflects their tastes and they’ll decide whether or not they should buy the game based on that.”

Tina Amini, a member of the Circle and a game critic at Kotaku, believes videogame criticism will gain more recognition in the future.

“In general the industry isn’t as respected,” she said. “It just comes with the territory. For now, it’s super internal. If you look around, everybody’s a very dedicated gamer. But you have to start somewhere, so hopefully it starts gaining traction. It’s a slow, uphill climb.”

Clockwise from left: Damian Lewis in Homeland, Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire, Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead, Jon Hamm in Mad Men, and Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. (Ed Johnson)

On Sunday night, as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were making history as the first two women to successfully elbow out a male host for the Golden Globes, audiences took in an unprecedented display of girl power. With Lena Dunham winning for Best Actress in a Comedy, Girls taking Best Comedy, and Julianne Moore winning for Game Change, we trumpeted a new era ... one in which women could not only captivate an audience but do so with an unlikable protagonist. (Hannah Horvath is no Tony Soprano, but she can be plenty unappealing at times.)

Many of the night’s other nominees, including the stars of Veep and Nashville, fit into the same category, as did the un-nominated (but still there in spirit) Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, Laura Linney in The Big C and Laura Dern in the criminally under-watched Enlightened, which premiered its second season this week. This last is perhaps the best example of these hard-to-watch heroines, with Ms. Dern playing the most delusional, self-righteous and self-martyring female antihero ever to traipse through premium cable.

It was a great night for rude, crude, progressive women. Unfortunately, it was an even better night for Bad Men.

In 2007, when Mad Men won the Globes for both Best Drama and Best Actor, AMC’s new prime-time show featuring gin-swilling 1960s philanderer Don Draper as its protagonist was still considered edgy for a non-premium cable show. Today, networks feature increasingly despicable, morally complex and utterly doomed characters, and the awards tend to follow. In the last several years, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has seen fit to nominate a serial killer (Dexter), a U.S. Marine-turned-Islamic terrorist (Sgt. Nicholas Brody in Homeland), several corrupt politicians (Enoch “Nucky” Thompson from Boardwalk Empire and Boss’s Tom Kane) and the world’s most dangerous high school science teacher (Breaking Bad’s Walter White) in its Best Drama and Best Actor categories.

This year, four of these ne’er-do-wells crowded the Best Actor box, with accolades for Homeland’s Damian Lewis, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm and Boardwalk’s Steve Buscemi. The only exception to the rule: the disgruntled-but-ultimately righteous Will McAvoy from The Newsroom. God save us when an Aaron Sorkin antihero is the closest we get to a good guy.

The rest are endemic of a new trend in millennial TV protagonists—men who are, if not quite villains, then at least Bad Men. At best, our guy is an immoral misanthrope and a latent misogynist. At worst, he’s a sociopath, one who may or may not be running an international drug cartel. Or a terrorist ring. If you’re lucky, he’s merely a serial killer who kills other killers. And the scary thing is: we relate to them. We empathize. And if they don’t already hate their wives and children, not to worry—we do. How can we not, what with the missus harping about domestic nonsense when there is a meth empire to run or a presidential front-runner to assassinate?

It’s not just awards-season accolades that reflect the shift away from shows about good guys: Homeland, Breaking Bad and Dexter beat their top ratings last season. The Walking Dead surprised even its biggest fans by shattering basic cable numbers with its season-three premiere, which saw an audience of 10.9 million total viewers, the “biggest telecast for any drama series in basic cable history,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s not hard to see what attracts today’s audience to these characters. For the first time in our history, the majority of men will not be able to surpass their fathers in wealth or status. With the recession, record job losses and lack of affordable health care, the Great Emasculation is well underway. Thus our need for men who at least take a stand, for good or ill, men whose nihilism often stems from psychic trauma. Men who, if not kind or ethical, survive and even flourish under dismal conditions. They might not be heroes, but we respect them.

Unlike, say, their horrible wives.

Take, for instance, Jessica Brody, the wife on Homeland played by Morena Baccarin. Not only did she cheat on Sgt. Brody during his eight years in captivity and after he returned, she pestered him for “the truth” throughout season one, only to freak out about his embrace of Islam and finally kick him to the curb. Meanwhile, Brody tried—he really did—to be a good husband and father even as he plotted his terror attack. If only Jessica hadn’t been so nosy, if only his daughter Dana had shown him a little bit more respect, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to run off with a bipolar C.I.A. agent.

Which isn’t to say that the protagonists of these shows ever voice any misogynistic tendencies. They don’t have to. It’s the programs themselves that turn the viewers against long-suffering wives, female colleagues and blameless children. A recent Huffington Post article on the 21 Worst Characters on television included the love interests on The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire. These shows, along with Breaking Bad and Homeland, all portray nosy, ineffectual matriarchs who are simultaneously ice-cold bitches, helpless victims and puritanical enforcers. We resent these women for the usual reasons women are often resented: because they are nosy, because they aren’t affectionate enough, because can’t keep their husbands from straying, because they are not always perfect mothers. Of course, they are driven to the brink by their husbands’ actions. But in a world that glorifies amorality, women are the spoilsports. They might be “good” (at least in relation to their husbands), but that makes them worse than bad. It makes them sneaky, shrewish and thoroughly unsympathetic victims.

Walter White is a Bad Men:

But Skylar is kind of worse:

Even worse, they are whores.

For instance, even though both Jessica Brody and Lori Grimes had the moral loophole of thinking their husbands were dead, we can’t help but resent them for carrying on with their husbands’ best friends. Betty Draper and Skyler White are also guilty of the cardinal female sin of infidelity, which is much harder to swallow, somehow, then when their fellows stray. (Poor Walter White has been at least sexually faithful to his wife, only to have her retaliate for his drug dealing by having an affair with her boss.)

Despite the flagrant violence of these shows, the Bad Men still tend to put “family first,” long after they give up every other social convention. And if they lash out occasionally (Draper’s constant bordering-on-abusive-relationships with his paramours, including both his current and former wives) or engage in stalker-level harassment (Walter White breaking into the house of his separated wife and refusing to leave), we sympathize.

In December, a 26-year-old Long Island man named Jared Gurman got into a fight with his girlfriend of three and a half years. They were arguing about The Walking Dead. Mr. Gurman—who described himself on Facebook as “an underappreciated person,” who felt that he should be “making more money at work”—took out a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle and shot his girlfriend in the back. She ended up with fractured ribs and a punctured lung and diaphragm, all for calling Mr. Gurman’s theory about the zombie apocalypse “ridiculous.” Fans of the show might recognize a certain irony: despite a plethora of semi-automatics and reasons to put one to his wife’s head, Rick Grimes never took a shot at his wife.

What a mensch!

We've found the 10 "best" listings this year, as well as their estimated price, terms and conditions, and number of bidders. (And if someone wants to get us that meeting with Harvey, we'll take it!)

You don't want Rick Grimes as your boyfriend. (AMC)

Have you noticed that in the last several years, most of the "brilliant" TV shows on AMC, Showtime and HBO star these dangerous, psychopathic anti-heroes? From Dexter to Don Draper, Nick Brody to Rick Grimes, Walter White to the ultimate don, Tony Soprano, one gets the sense that while the rest of American culture is taking one step forward on progressive women's rights issues, our beloved TV shows are moving us two steps back.

And what's weird is how we love these horrible men. "I'm such a Carrie" no longer refers to the ultimate Bradshaw, but the bipolar Claire Danes on Homeland ... the kind of gal who falls in love with a terrorist, despite the fact that he ends up subjecting her to electro-shock therapy treatments after they have sex. And they are still in love, or something! How sexy is that, ladies?

But wait, it gets worse...

From Newsday.com:

A Williston Park man who police say shot his girlfriend in the back with a rifle after a heated argument over the television show “The Walking Dead” was ordered jailed without bail at his arraignment Tuesday.

Jared Gurman, 26, of 516 Marcellus Rd., is being held on a charge of attempted murder after the shooting at about 2:40 a.m. Monday at his apartment.

A single round from a .22 caliber rifle pierced the victim’s lung and diaphragm and shattered her ribs, police said.

It's a funny thing, too: a quick glance at the weapons used in The Walking Dead shows a lot of .22 caliber rifles ...

Dish gets back their troubled heroes (AMC)

Which begs the question: Why now?

The new deal, according to The New York Post, has Dish paying AMC Networks and Cablevision $700 million in cash (to be stored in Walter White-styled locker), and in return, AMC will let Dish show their programming.

When the threat of Dish cutting off service first came to our attention, they were getting awful close to the 11th hour mark for the premiere of the season of Mad Men.

"Don't worry, this has happened before," a colleague said, referring to Dish's continuing war-time negotiations with Cablevision. But this one was different: the premiere came and went, and Dish refused to play ball, despite the fact that in the past year, AMC Network had split from Cablevision and was now a privately owned company run by Josh Sapan.

But Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead (along with Mad Men) are the three major staples of AMC's brand network. So why fold for the zombie show instead of the one getting all the Emmys?

It's pretty simple: while Breaking Bad is critically acclaimed, its ratings high for the series premiere brought them 2.9 million viewers. For The Walking Dead season three premiere, the record for the network was shattered with an astonishing 10 million tuning into the opening. Once Dish saw how many potential eyes they could be losing, reaching a deal with AMC was a no-BRAINS!-er.

All Those Marvel Films

OK, so Iron Man 2 was slightly disappointing -- though really, it was just as good as the first one, but with the added weight of expectation -- but that doesn't mean Marvel properties won't rule the box office roost for the foreseeable future. Thor, Captain America and The Avengers -- Marvel's superhero super group -- will all have big presences at Comic-Con, but The Avengers offers the most interesting subplot. That being: Is Mark Ruffalo going to replace Edward Norton in the role of The Hulk? Expect some sort of announcement either way before Comic-Con closes.

The Walking Dead

As AMC continues to branch further out into the world of original programming -- based on the pilot, August's twisty conspiracy thriller Rubicon is already a winner -- it goes to reason that the prestigious network would find themselves a genre show to sink their teeth into. Enter The Walking Dead. From the graphic novel by Robert Kirkman, Dead is one of those "last group of people on earth fight zombies" stories and judging from the initial images, expect enough gore to make George Romero proud. Also, expect some good storytelling: Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) is the executive producer and directs the pilot which airs this fall.

Tron Legacy

Don't worry: we barely remember Tron either. But that didn't stop Disney from spending millions of dollars (and man-hours) creating a sequel. Jeff Bridges returns, as do those cool-looking motorcycles and the "futuristic" color palette. This is coming out on the same weekend that Avatar did, so clearly anything less than $3 billion in grosses will be a disappointment.

The Event

Without Lost to confound, delight and excite Comic-Con attendees, what television series will step up to fill the mysterious, Dharma Initiative void? NBC is hoping it's The Event. The generically titled series -- co-starring Blair Underwood as the president and Jason Ritter as the everyman on the trail of...the event -- combines the sprawling conspiracy and cliffhangers that are de rigueur in a post-Lost landscape. For NBC's sake, though, let's just hope this one turns out better than last year's Comic-Con sensation: FlashForward.